An overview of wind-energy-production  prediction bias, losses, and uncertainties

Lee, Joseph C. Y.; Fields, M. Jason

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-6-311-2021

Articles | Volume 6, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-6-311-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-6-311-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 6, issue 2

Review article

|

05 Mar 2021

Review article |

| 05 Mar 2021

An overview of wind-energy-production prediction bias, losses, and uncertainties

Joseph C. Y. Lee and M. Jason Fields

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Final revised paper (published on 05 Mar 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 10 Jul 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'major revisions recommended for "An Overview of Wind Energy Production Prediction Bias, Losses, and Uncertainties"', Mark Kelly, 17 Aug 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Referee 1', Joseph C. Y. Lee, 16 Oct 2020
RC2: 'Recommendation of Major Revision for "An Overview of Wind Energy Production Orediction Bias, Lossesm and Uncertainties"', Anonymous Referee #2, 30 Sep 2020
- AC2: 'Response to Referee 2', Joseph C. Y. Lee, 16 Oct 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Joseph C. Y. Lee on behalf of the Authors (16 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (04 Nov 2020) by Carlo L. Bottasso

RR by Mark Kelly (30 Nov 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript has been improved to almost being publishable; thus this reviewer has only a smaller number of comments and one query---amounting to a few minor revisions.

Specifically:
l.10: `reducing' should be `declining'.

l.44: "causes powerful" is not appropriate English here; I'd suggest "has significant" or "results in marked", or similar...

l.50: "errors that deviate observations or model predictions from the truth lead to uncertainty" does not make sense--please clean up (should there be a `from' in there?)

l.51: "uncertainty can be expressed in probability" should perhaps be replaced more exactly with `uncertainty is quantified via probability'.

l.54: The statement "Given a Gaussian distribution, the standard deviation around the mean represents the uncertainty of that distribution" is not technically correct. Rather, for _errors_ which are Gaussian-distributed, the standard deviation is typically taken to represent the uncertainty, aside from the mean error (bias).

l.92: remove 's' from 'millions'

Regarding your response to my question "the intermonthly variability appears to be much too large; is this taken out of context? E.g., is this a just a higher percentage of a smaller number than the other losses?":
you write "For Fig. 9, we only have 1 data point for the observed uncertainty of energy production loss from month to month. That study explicitly cited that the intermonthly variability contributes to 10% to 14% of energy production loss, depending on the lo- cation. The study did not specify which types of categorical energy production loss it refers to, so we cannot answer on your last question with evidence. We understand that the value is nontrivial in magnitude while this is what was reported in that study. Regarding Fig. 12, the green dot of intermonthly variability you refer to is also from the same study above. They observed 19% to 24% of wind speed variability from month to month, depending on the region."
Why not include (some of) this response in the text, to clarify for the reader also?

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (09 Jan 2021)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (09 Jan 2021) by Carlo L. Bottasso

AR by Joseph C. Y. Lee on behalf of the Authors (11 Jan 2021) Author's tracked changes

ED: Publish as is (13 Jan 2021) by Carlo L. Bottasso

ED: Publish as is (19 Jan 2021) by Jakob Mann (Chief editor)

AR by Joseph C. Y. Lee on behalf of the Authors (21 Jan 2021) Manuscript

Short summary

This review paper evaluates the energy prediction bias in the wind resource assessment process, and the overprediction bias is decreasing over time. We examine the estimated and observed losses and uncertainties in energy production from the literature, according to the proposed framework in the International Electrotechnical Commission 61400-15 standard. The considerable uncertainties call for further improvements in the prediction methodologies and more observations for validation.